Sunday, June 17, 2012

Chapter 3 of the Psi-punk Choose Your Own Adventure is out! This week's episode, Nolan Holtz hires Frank "the Tank" Sanders to help him with a routine package drop... but how will they get it to its destination?

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Anyone who's played certain editions of Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder will tell you that the Spot and/or Perception skills are some of the most-utilized skills in the game. In some groups, it's considered to be the only skill that every character should have.

Contributing to the craziness of Perception is the fact that the games encourage users to make skill checks for nearly everything they want to do, and there aren't really very strong guidelines about when to tell a character to make a Perception check and when to just give them the information they request. The Difficulty Class (DC) charts for the Perception skill in Pathfinder, for example, have DCs that range between -10 (hear the sound of battle) to 25 (hear a bow being drawn). Source: d20PFSRD.com: Perception.

A common scene in any d20/Pathfinder game may go a little something like this:

Player 1: "I look around the room. Do I notice anything?"GM: "Make a Perception check."Player 1: [Rolls a 5] "Dang, only a 5. I guess I don't."Player 2: "Here, let me try." [Picks up dice.]Players 3, 4, and 5: [Pick up dice.]

Ultimately this scenario boils down into a test to see who can roll the highest number first. The players are just investigating a room and aren't looking for anyone or anything in particular. All they know is that they're searching for anything that may not have been part of the initial description of the room. They're not in any danger, and there's no harm if they fail (aside from, perhaps, missing a pertinent clue) so they can take as much time doing this as they'd like (in fact, the system even has a rule for this, called "Taking 20").

This is all nothing more than an exercise in dice rolling, and in my opinion gamers don't need any more practice with that (we're already Great at it, thankyouverymuch). In Psi-punk, we've come up with a different solution to making Notice checks and, indeed, any skill check. It's really more of a guideline, in the form of some GM guidance.

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 8: Game Mastering about adjudicating skill checks that we hope will help GMs make decisions about when skill checks are necessary and when they aren't.

Adjudicating Skill Checks

As the Game Master, it is your job to let the players
know when they should be making skill checks and when they can simply expect to
accomplish a task. You should already be familiar with how skill checks work
(if not, read Chapter 4: Playing the Game)
but simply knowing the mechanics behind the skills doesn’t give you guidance
about when or where they should be invoked.

From a mechanical and dice-rolling standpoint, the goals of Psi-punk are simplicity and speed.The game should run smoothly and without too
much dice rolling getting in the way of the story. With that being said, it is important to only
ask the players to make skill checks when absolutely necessary. So how do you know when it’s necessary?

As a rule of thumb, if the task is so easy that a normal
person could do it as part of his daily routine, it doesn’t deserve a dice
roll. For example, driving a car to work
is routine for most people, while performing medical surgery is routine for
many ER doctors. Unless pressed for
time, stressed, or otherwise hindered, these sorts of routine checks aren’t
necessary.

Another good rule of thumb is that a character who is at
least Fair at a given task shouldn’t need to make a roll for it unless opposed by
someone or something else. A gourmet
chef doesn’t need to make a skill check to cook a fancy dinner unless he’s in a
contest against other chefs to see who can make the fanciest dinner, for example.

In game terms, this means that skills such as Language aren’t
necessary to roll against unless a character is trying to decode a message, understand
spoken dialogue in a language for which he has only a Mediocre comprehension,
or to communicate to someone with only a Mediocre level of understanding.

Likewise, driving or piloting a vehicle is considered a
simple task for most people (especially since nowadays most cars drive themselves)
and characters can really only screw up when circumstances are out of the
ordinary, such as during a chase, along a windy road on a stormy night, or when
piloting a very technical craft such as a helicopter or tank.

Many GMs have a particularly difficult time determining when
to call for Notice checks. Other games
often use Notice or Perception checks far too frequently (at least compared to
their Psi-punk counterpart) so keep
the following in mind: when in doubt, don’t ask for it.Notice, in any of it sforms, shouldn’t be
used as a precursor to divulging information to the players. If a character says he is searching the room
for clues, you should give him everything he needs to know – unless, of course,
he is trying to quickly scan the room for evidence while under suppressive
gunfire. Ordinarily, Notice skills
should only be employed when actively searching for targets that are being
actively hidden from them (e.g., a Spot check made to notice a character using
Stealth, or a Taste check used to notice chemical ingredients too subtle for
the average human to detect).

Allowing characters to do things within their normal range
of skill without making dice rolls will not only speed up the game, it will
help players feel like their skills actually matter. Nobody likes to try doing something that they’re
Great at only to randomly fail for seemingly no reason, for example. It is, however, understandable that even a
Great artist make something that is only Mediocre compared to the talented
craft of a Superb artist.By calling for
skill checks only when necessary, you will actually add depth to your game and may be surprised at how much more
creative the players will try to be.

What do you think of this advice? Do you think skills should be used any time they might be employed, or should it only matter when failure is a problem? Would you prefer a system in which you can Take 10/Take 20 and still potentially fail a check, or one in which failure only occurs when stress is involved? Let us know in the comments!

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Recently I helped put together a new playtest campaign for Psi-punk. Like the playtest we ran at Gamestorm in March I am not the GM, but that gives me more time to take notes and consider changes that are important to the success of the game.

A buddy of mine called me up last week and said "I don't know about you,
but it's been entirely too long since I've gamed. Why don't we put
together a playtest of your new system?" Naturally, I was all for it.

This
is the same person who GMed the playtest sessions at Gamestorm
previously, so it was great to know he's still excited about Psi-punk.
He already had two players in mind, and after making a few more phone
calls we put together our first session.

The first session was
just a character creation and "getting to know you" event. I didn't
know two of the new players, and none of the people (other than the GM)
knew the game, so we hung out for a few hours and put together a team.
We made plans to meet the following week, and that's what we did just
last night (Monday, June 11th).

Two of the players at the
character creation session didn't wind up making it to the second game,
but we picked up a different new player and kept going anyway. All
total, we have 5 players and one GM - and I'm amongst the players.

Our CrewI
am playing a Muay Thai specialist with cyber legs, cyber eyes, and a
tendency to go berserk when wounded. Originally I wasn't planning on
being the fighter-type of the group (I'm almost always the fighter-type)
but after everyone else had decided on characters I decided it was a
role that still needed to be filled. My character's name is something in
Thai that I found on a baby name website, but since noone can pronounce
it he just goes by "John Tom."

Next we have Lesly/ie Turner, a
"changeling" (someone who can alter the state of living matter,
including his own body) that works for the Treasury Department as a sort
of anti-counterfeiting guy. We're not sure to what extent
counterfeiting exists in a world where money is purely digital, but I'm
sure it has something to do with anti-hacking as well.

Then we
have "Jack Daniels" the private investigator. This is the character of
the person who wasn't at the previous character creation system. She
(the player) showed up knowing only two things about the game she'd be
playing: it was cyberpunk and there would be psionics. Not knowing
anything else, she brought a d20 Modern character sheet (since that was
the last modern/cyberpunk system our group played) and a character
concept about a P.I. with some mind control powers.

What was
great about this experience is that we had the chance to see how quickly
we could convert a character from another system to Psi-punk's
Fudge-based system on the fly. It was actually really simple, and the
player said she felt it was very intuitive. We just translated some of
her skills and powers into Fudge equivalents and gave her the Mind
Control psionic power/Gift. She filled in additional skills, Faults,
and character options as we played. We rarely had to stop the action to
do any extra work on her sheet and she was able to jump right into the
game and picked up the mechanics very quickly.

After Jack Daniels
there was another character, whose name I can't remember (since
everyone seemed to have trouble coming up with names at first), that is
playing another sort of investigative type. He has OCD and Narcolepsy as
his two greatest Faults which have both proven interesting so far (more
on that later).

Finally, we had a computer hacker/electrokinetic
whose name I also unfortunately don't recall off-hand. The player is
completely new to role-playing games and was originally just going to
watch and see how things work, but she decided to join us when we
offered to help her build a character. We're really glad she joined us,
too -- she struggles only slightly with the rules (and I suspect that's
because all of the concepts are completely new to her) but has *no*
problem getting into character and role-playing. She actually came up
with a lot of the solutions to a lot of the problems we encountered, so
that was very exciting.

The GameThe basic background
of the story is that a number of "cities" have been popping up in
cyberspace in which people can have their entire brain uploaded into the
cloud to live indefinitely as a cyber-avatar. Some terrorist
organization has been targeting the servers that house these virtual
cities and destroying them, effectively killing millions of cyber-people
at once. Since these duplicates of their personalities are generally
all that are left of the people, it's an act akin to mass murder.

One
such server farm, located on an old gunnery platform out at sea, was
just hit by an attack and each of the players was sent, for one reason
or another, to the location.

For starters, a lead programmer (and
minor celebrity) of the software was being choppered out to the server
farm to perform damage control and salvage what data he could. My
character is an MMA celebrity that owes favors to someone who got him
into the busienss, so that debt was called in and I wound up having to
act as bodyguard to this programmer.

Jack Daniels is a solo P.I
who came to investigate the goings-on, and the hacker decided to sneak
onto the platform and into the server room to steal what data she could
for a client. Meanwhile, the counterfeit investigator (Lesly Turner)
was tipped off by his agency that said hacker was going to be there and
*he* was sent to stop her. The other guy's backstory is that he works
for a major insurance agency, so he was sent by his firm (who insure the
server-cities) to find and invalidate any evidence that could be used
to file a claim - he was sent to make sure that the insurance company
didn't have to pay out.

The hacker and the investigator played a
game of cat-and-mouse as one tried to hack the servers and the other
tried to catch her doing it. Jack Daniels and I waited for the arrival
of the programmer and the insurance claims investigator interrogated
some of the employees on board and began pouring over a bunch of
documents in an effort to find some contradicting evidence that could
prove negligence on behalf of the server-city.

Just as the
programmer's helicopter arrived on the scene, we were attacked by a
group of heavily-cybered terrorists. There were hordes of them, and they
were heading straight for the chopper. Jack Daniels and I climbed to
the highest poitn on the platform, near where the chopper was landing,
and tried to defend it.

As I punched and kicked my way through
hordes of goons, Jack used his Mind Control powers on one of the "boss"
terrorist guys that was wreaking havoc on the landing aircraft. She
rolled max on her mind control check and wound up completely dominating
the guy, who she told to go kill her buddies instead. Score!

Just
as this was starting, the insurance investigator had received a bunch
of documents and was meticulously pouring over them. He was out of the
combat for a few rounds as his OCD kicked in and he ignored everything
around him for the sake of his mission at hand.

Also at the same
time, the counterfeit investigator had found the hacker in the server
room and she was in the process of gathering info about the server AI
and the virus that had caused it to malfunction and wipe. She couldn't
have him bothering her, so she used her own mind control abiltiies to
charm him into leaving her alone and fighting off some bad guys outside
instead.

Suffice it to say, we eventually killed a bunch of goons
and took a little bit of hurt ourselves. Just when we thought we were
doing well, and we had the programmer in the server room doing his job,
the giant plot device showed up and wiped us all with an overpowering
sonic attack.

We woke up a month later in a jail cell, having
none of our equipment and remembering nothing. As we tried to talk with
fellow prisoners and guards, we learned that we had supposedly had a
trial already and were being charged with the murder of the programmer
and were under suspicion of terrorism

We tried a number of
different angles to better our situation. Psionics weren't working very
well due to some psi-dampening technology that was affecting the whole
prison, and we weren't able to hack anything because our equipment was
taken from us.

Eventually myself, a MMA celebrity who many of the
inmates recognized, and the hacker -- who had a reputation amongst
criminals -- had each gathered quite a following of inmates who were
friendly to each of us. I suggested we stage a prison riot and use the
distraction to try to escape.

The hacker and I had each of our
gangs attack each other and eventually that led to all-out rioting
throughout the jail. THe psi-dampers were overwhelmed by the amount of
psionics being flung around by inmates and security alike, which gave
Jack Daniels the opportunity to mind control a high-ranking doctor and
causing her to think our team needed medical treatment.

SHe
rushed us all down to the medical bay where some other nurses tried to
help, but we realized that their medical scanners would prove us to all
be in good health. The changeling, then, altered his body to deliver a
Very Hurt wound to himself and truly make a believable case for us being
in jured. Our hacker ensured the med-bots scanned him first, and since
the bots were able to show that he was in dire condition we managed to
con them all into rushing us out of the prison toward a hospital.

The
prison warden didn't like the sight of prisoners being hauled off
anywhere during a riot, but some mysterious benefactor hacked his
cyberware and fried him (we heard allusions previously that someone was
trying to help us but we didn't know who, and now we were sure someone
on the outside was looking out for us).

Just as we were getting
outside and the medical chopper was landing to pick us up though, the
head doctor snapped out of her mind control and called the nurses and
guards to stop us. We briefly fought our way from the yard to the
helicopter where the pilots had already been fried by our benefactor and
the chopper programmed to take us somewhere safe.

While making
our escape in the chopper, we got a message over a vid screen from the
programmer we had met on the server-city platform before. It was cryptic
and had to do with himself being in danger and needing us to come find
him at some address in an industrial district.

WIth nothing else
to go on and in desperate need of clearing our names, we all decided to
put aside the difference we had (such as with the counterfeit
investigator and the hacker) and check it out. First, though, we needed
to find a way to get rid of our prison clothes and find some
firearms...

ConclusionThat's where we wrapped up for
the night. We gained a couple of Build Points (XP) and talked a bit
about the session before parting.

I was really excited that the
brand-new role-player was having a good time and really getting into the
game. The girl who had missed the character creation session and
didn't have a chance to look over any of the rules said that she felt
the system was easy to pick-up-and-play and seemed very intuitive, which
was another plus.

Overall, I'm really excited about the
direction this playtest campaign is going and I can't wait until next
Monday when we get to see what happens next!

Saturday, June 2, 2012

While we're waiting on one last crucial item to come back from an artist, we've started a Choose Your Own Adventure-style game over at RPGGeek.com that we invite you to participate in.

You'll need to be a registered member to participate in the poll, but you can read all of the story sections even if you're not. Registration is free, so if you're not already a member why not sign up and join in the fun?

As an added bonus, active participants will not only get to shape the story, but will have the option to receive "Special Thanks" credit in the upcoming Psi-punk sourcebook. If this story continues long enough, we'll even offer up a fully-collected anthology to our Kickstarter backers!